News

Rapid Response Corps to Speed Up Reaction of Emerging Diseases

26 September 2017

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US - The Executive Director of the Swine health Information Center says the creation of a Rapid Response Corps will speed up the response to emerging diseases that pose a threat to the US swine herd, according to Bruce Cochrane.

The Swine Health Information Center in partnership with the University of Iowa has created a Rapid Response Program and is recruiting members for a Rapid Response Corps, individuals who can be dispatched to locations to investigate diseases of unknown epidemiology that have been identified.

Dr Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Center

We've divided the country up into six regions.

The objective behind that dividing up into regions is so our teams, our rapid response teams, will be able to drive to the site of the outbreak.

One of the lessons learned from the PED outbreak, when we tried to do rapid response investigations from PED, it was good investigation but it wasn't very rapid because we had to fly people from one part of the country to the other so it was delayed.

What we're trying to do here is ensure that we can get experts onto the farm right away.

Within each of those regions we've identified experts in the fields of veterinary medicine, of veterinarians that consult, veterinarians that are good at disease investigation, of diagnosticians, of epidemiologists and also along with the state or federal animal health officials if they are appropriate to involve in the investigation.

What we want to do is, within each of those regions, get the experts that are within those regions mobilized so they can quickly get onto the farm in case there's an outbreak.

Dr Sundberg says Rapid Response Corps training is available through swinehealth.org and will be provided on an ongoing basis.